We Need More Liberals

If you’re losing the football game 56-17, you’re not free to change the rules at halftime. You have to start playing better. Christians need to start playing better culturally.

In my youth and young adulthood, left-leaning Americans were proud to call themselves “liberals.” They believed in increased political intervention in the economy; they were suspicious of Christian influence in culture; and they were soft on communism.

On the other side of the political aisle were the conservatives. They believed that the state’s task is to secure maximum individual liberty under law; that politicians should stay out of economic exchanges, including exchanges across international borders; and that Christianity should have a greater influence on culture. They were also virulently anti-communist.

But something strange happened on the way to the 21st century. Almost nobody on the Left uses the self-referential term “liberal” anymore. Rather, they have rehabilitated the early 20th century moniker “progressive.” Where have all the liberals gone? Well, the fact is that true conservatives were liberal all along, where “liberal” was understood in its original sense as classically liberal, pro-liberty. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater were classical liberals.

Why did Leftists shed the moniker “liberal”? Maybe because it sounded too much like “liberty,” which is not exactly the image they wanted to convey any longer, since they are interested in depriving liberty to expand the role of the state in creating a perfectly just society — as Leftists define justice, of course. “Progressive” implies the long march on “the right [= Left] side of history” toward utopia, so “progressivism,” with its strong whiff of historical inevitability, naturally sounds more appropriate.

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Our broad thinking about life doesn’t just shape our view of human sexuality. Our view of human sexuality shapes the rest of our thinking. Western society’s sexual views and practices over the last few decades haven’t changed so dramatically only because the prominent worldview of our society has changed; our society has changed because its sexual worldview has changed.

This book is about why and how that change came about, how injurious it has been to our culture, and what Christians can do to reverse it. A distinctively Christian strategy for reversing the sexual revolution and its worldview is a restoration of a full-orbed, biblical faith in every aspect of thought and life.

Get the book here. 

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Christian Culture and Christian Nations

If this explanation sounds contradictory coming from the keyboard of a Christian (me) who has staked his life and ministry on fostering the restoration of Christian culture, it’s because many people have (in my view) a defective view of Christian culture, and Christian politics, and the Christian nation.

For some reason we hear increasingly about “Christian nationalism,” and given a certain definition, it’s a perfectly acceptable expression. Christians should be urgently committed to Christianizing the nation, but that means precisely the opposite of supporting nations that Christianize citizens. A Christian nation is one severely chained to biblical limits, allowing its citizens to live a quiet and peaceful life (1 Timothy 2:1–3). It protects life, liberty, and property, in terms of the moral law of God. It does not inculcate Christianity or virtue, except the virtue of liberty.

It is true that all law is pedagogical: it teaches; it doesn’t simply forbid. The civil dimension of God’s moral law teaches, for example, that it is wrong to murder people, to assault people, to steal their property. It teaches that human life and health and property are valuable and should be protected, coercively if necessary.

But most law is not civil law. When we hear the term “law,” we almost always think of civil law, but the vast majority of law is familial law, ecclesiastical law, economic law, architectural law, artistic law, educational law, and so on. The fact that we don’t even think of these terms shows how far we have apostatized from God’s inherent law structures and from an understanding of “sphere sovereignty.”

In other words, we are dangerously obsessed with politics.

The responsibility for Christianizing rests with God’s other vital spheres than politics: the family and church, for example. We have a name for nations that work to inculcate virtue, including religious virtue: dictatorships. The Christians who first arrived on our shores were fleeing just that sort of virtue-inculcating dictatorship.

They were far from secularists attempting to establish a secular order. All to the contrary. They wanted a Christian social order. Some were classical liberals, and some were not, but, thank God, the classically liberal, that is, the consistently Protestant, vision prevailed at the U.S. founding about 150 years later.

Today’s “common good conservatives” see the state’s chief interest in maintaining a strong, virtuous, national consensus. In this, they’re drifting away from the American political philosophy of classical liberalism and toward the older European political philosophy of a strong national purpose.

To refer to this European move as “Christian Nationalism” in America is particularly ironic.

It is also a fool’s errand. Not that we don’t have examples historically of common-good conservatives. Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s national fascism are prime examples. They would have disagreed only with today’s common-good conservatives on defining what the common good is and how vigorously to enforce it. Larry Ball, decades-long defender of Christian culture and biblical law, is likely correct, therefore, when he argues “‘Christian Nationalism’: Dump the Term While We Still Can.”

The U.S. founders knew the score. The common good should be generated and fostered and preserved by what we call civil society — self-governing, virtuous individuals, families, churches, businesses, and other pre- and non-political communities. The state is to provide a framework within which this can peacefully happen. That is the state’s uncommonly common good.

To be liberal, both denotatively and historically, is to stand for liberty, the free society, the sort of society envisioned by the U.S. founders influenced by historic Protestantism.

But to be progressive, one need not be liberal at all. Indeed, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, and Pol Pot were all quintessential progressives: they believed that society is a long march of progress engineered by Leftist elites inexorably leveraging political power.

This is not liberal, to put it mildly.

The Single Positive Role of the State

Classical liberals view the role of the state as mostly negative, and positive in one chief sense. It’s not supposed to do a whole lot of things, and supposed to do one main thing: protect liberty — individual liberty, family liberty, church liberty, business liberty, and so on. In the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson memorably put it this way:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …

Political governments are not instituted for many reasons, but for one reason: to protect the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — in other words, liberty.

Therefore, Christians should be working to enact laws that contribute to that objective: protect the life of preborn children, protect the liberty of the family and church, and protect the individual’s pursuit of happiness within the bounds of God’s moral law.

Governments are not instituted to create a virtuous citizenry, or to fulfill a grand social vision, or create a cohesive religious community, even a Christian one. We sometimes speak of the Great American Experiment, and it was a great experiment in one thing — liberty.

It’s true, as the common-good conservatives charge, that this framework also permits the destruction of virtue. That’s the price of liberty. And this is precisely what’s happened in the United States over the last generation.

But the solution to this problem isn’t to attack and destroy the political framework of liberty, but to revive and recover strongly virtuous individuals and institutions. If you’re losing the football game 56-17 in the second quarter, you’re not free to hastily petition the league commissioner at halftime to allow your team six downs a possession and reduce the other team to two downs. You have to start playing better.

During the last two cultural quarters, Christians have been losing, and it’s high time we start playing better, gradually recapturing institutions and, where that is not possible, creating alternative institutions. We must do this all within the context of the liberty society, the Christian society — classical liberalism.

It is for this reason that we liberty-loving Christians committed to re-Christianizing society should happily reappropriate the self-identification “liberal.”

Embrace it loudly. We are liberals. We stand for the liberal society. We stand for the free, Protestant society, and for the Christianization of all areas of life and thought.

We need more liberals, and particularly, more Christians committed to just this kind of liberalism.

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